So yesterday some video was unearthed that appears to show some Marines in Afghanistan urinating on dead Taliban bodies. The DoD went into immediate overdrive to start investigating, condemning the actions, etc. And I was expecting a pushback about it from some quarter. Like below.
Why should we care about this? Aren't the Taliban terrorists and killers and aren't they active enemies of our troops over there? Sure. And doesn't that mean we can do whatever we want to their bullet-ridden corpses? Um … no.
See, there are international laws about this sort of thing. And there are military codes of conduct as well. And they have both philosophical and practical reasons.
Philosophically, it's just not right. It's childish, and undignified for the perpetrators and it's simply wrong. Because it violates the Golden Rule, for one thing (and a whole bunch of related things, too). Because, evil Islamicist bastards or not, they're still human beings. And the argument that "They do bad things, too" is the lamest excuse in the world; we don't accept it from five-year-olds, and we shouldn't accept it from US Marines.
Practically, there are even greater reasons. Let me rattle off a few.
1. Want to outrage a bunch of people, and perhaps push them into more violent actions against you when they might have been otherwise willing to leave well enough alone? Pull this kind of crap on the dead bodies of folks who might be their relatives, their neighbors, their friends.
2. Want to encourage the Taliban to do the same (or worse) to our dead soldiers? Give them an example. After all, brutal killers or not, they think they are the good guys, too. Historic example: there are indications that Native Americans learned the habit of scalping from the Europeans. This sort of thing rarely ends well … and usually escalates, too.
3. Want to further tarnish the reputation of American soldiers as professionals there to do a hard but necessary job? Do things like this.
4. Want to encourage even worse things to be done by our troops? Look the other way on something like this. And maybe next time it will be pissing on live prisoners. Or killing live prisoners and then pissing on them. Why not? If they're bad and evil enemies of our country and our troops, what behavior is not justified toward them?
People who say they could "care less" about this activity have no idea what professionalism is, nor human dignity. There are, in their eyes, only Our Tribe and Their Tribe, and anything Our Tribe does to Their Tribe is okay. For my part, I'd like to think that Our Tribe stands for something more than we can gun people down and piss on their bodies. #ddtb
Embedded Link
Conservative pushback on Marine Corps vid
And here’s another asshat, Dana Loesch, gleefully high-fiving the Marines for this and saying she’d do the same thing.